This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined as follows:
BTS base transceiver system
CCE control channel element
CoMP coordinated multi-point
CQI channel quality indication
c-RNTI cell-radio network temporary identifier
eNB evolved Node-B
H-eNB home eNB
LTE long term evolution
PDCCH physical downlink control channel
REG resource element group
RRM radio resource management
SINR signal to interference and noise ratio
UE user equipment
WCDMA wideband code division multiple access
Currently the view for future releases of LTE or even LTE-Advanced generally considers that the wireless communication bandwidth availability may be met by parsing the cells of the currently deployed macro-cell architectures into micro-cells. Two general approaches are seen; micro-radio cells and a BTS hotel architecture. The former is expected to deploy femto, pico and/or micro cells anywhere wireless radio coverage is desired, such as within buildings and tunnels and on street corners and lampposts. In this approach each remote radio head acts as its own BTS over a micro-cell and many such micro-cells fill up the macro-cell. The BTS hotel arrangement is expected to use a single BTS per macro cell with distributed antennas throughout so as to provide discrete coverage of the separate micro-areas. In this early stage of development each approach has certain advantages and disadvantages as compared to the other.
FIG. 1 gives a general overview of the BTS hotel concept. The macro cells 101, 102, 103 are arranged relative to one another similar to common architectures currently in place; each cell is under control of a single BTS and adjacent cells manage interference at the cell edges via cooperative techniques, such as joint processing or joint scheduling between two cells, or other interference mitigation techniques, like for instance beam forming. Within one cell 101 there is the controlling BTS 110 and a network of distributed nodes 112, 114, 116, 118 that interface to the BTS via wired connections (not shown, but which may be for example copper wire/coaxial cable or fiber optic cable/radio over optic fiber). Each of the central BTS 110 and the remote nodes 112, 114, 116, 118 are responsible for scheduling users within a designed area designated as respective areas 111, 113, 115, 117 and 119. Such an arrangement is sometimes termed a CoMP architecture, and is at least partially deployed across select cities such as New York and Seattle and also in Korea which utilizes fiber optic control connections over WCDMA repeaters.
Regardless of the specific implementation, the BTS hotel arrangement enables fast and efficient intra-cell communication over the wired connections and baseband processing at the BTS. These aspects can be exploited to introduce more efficiency in the BTS hotel-type network via centralized coordination at the BTS. These teachings continue the development of wireless communications in that direction.